Thursday, September 30, 2004

Some thoughts on my vacation to Kauai - pt II

Hotel accommodations

Some months prior to our arrival, we booked a room on the ground floor of the Marriott, a fairly nice resort. Ground floor rooms are quite pleasing: you can just stroll out of your sliding glass doorway, cross some lush turf, and be on the sand in less time than it takes to empty a can of Hawaiian Sun Apricot-Orange Nectar into the commode*.

A week before our arrival, we called to confirm the ground floor booking. The desired accommodation was confirmed with absolute certainty, and several mahalos** were exchanged. Upon our arrival we were happily told by the front desk that we had been booked into a room on the top floor of the hotel, accessible only by steam ducts, the window of which faced an air-conditioning unit, on the side of which some agitated local had spray-painted “HAOLE GO HOME!”

After a good deal of “we said the opposite of that”-ing we were finally awarded our ground floor room, only to discover that the island’s resident population of feral chickens made a regular trek across the front of our lanai, ostensibly on a journey—far too late in the game—to find a toilet. Circumventing this little “perpetual shenanigan” required us to go about a hundred yards out of our way, or roughly four times the height of the building, to reach the sand. I know I shouldn’t complain about having to walk the length of a few supermarket aisles in order to lay on lush, tropical beaches, so please take this with a grain of salt. This blog entry is not for fans of hard-boiled crime fiction or lovers of Mother Jones slaughterhouse betrayals. I just want an open forum in which to talk about the bad things that the Hawaiian chickens did.

* Five seconds. Seven seconds if you include the last couple drips. Twelve fluid ounces.
** “Mahalo” is a Hawaiian term roughly equivalent to “thank you!” and “this is going to take a little while.”